20 Tips to Master Start-Up Hiring!
How to conquer your competition and beat them to the best in 2024.
Hello! Hi! Happy New Year, etc.
Welcome to my first blog of 2024!
If you were a reader towards the end of last year, you’ll know that 2024 is promising to be a year of high quality growth for many start-ups and scale-ups across Australia.
We’re expecting demand for developers with proven start-up experience to be incredibly high, and competition to be fierce as a result.
At the Staff/Principal level, we are already seeing levels of demand that I would describe as ‘unsustainable’, and I haven’t got any reason to expect that it’d slow down over the coming months either.
One thing is very clear though - whilst 2023 gave out participation awards for just attempting to hire, making everyone a winner, 2024 is going to be significantly more cutthroat, and shit will hit the fan for start-ups that don’t take their hiring efforts seriously.
Lucky for you, we built many of the country’s highest performing start-up tech teams in the most challenging market in recent history, so we know a thing or two about helping start-ups stand out from the crowd and out-do their competition.
And to kick things off in 2024, here’s 20 tips to help you master start-up hiring!
The Foundations
Who are you?:
Start with building out a very clear definition and understanding of your start-up. Where are you competitive, where do you fall short?
False beliefs, and a misunderstanding of the reality of where you stand is one of the most common and costly issues that we see with start-ups that find hiring challenging.
Understand Your Ideal Candidate:
Build an understanding of the type of candidates that you want to hire. Look beyond your surface level assumptions, and forge a clear picture of why you need (or believe that you need) certain skills or experience coming through.
In our experience, what start-ups initially ask for, and what they eventually pivot to are often quite different, but on reflection, it was usually obvious that this would be the case from the get go. Save yourself some time, figure it out now.
Invest into Building a Strong Employer Brand:
Make no mistake, this is not something that happens overnight. But perhaps that is why it’s all the more important to start now. Respectfully, as a start-up, it’s unlikely many candidates know who you are.
As you start to hire and grow, this will inevitably change, but it can go two ways - make sure your employer brand does not start to lean in the wrong direction.
Ensure your Comp Structure is not a Bottleneck:
Perhaps a harsh truth for some reading, but ‘start-ups pay poorly’ is a myth.
Based on our data from more than 100 start-up partners, for tech skills specifically, the start-up space has very consistently been sitting above the corporate space when it comes to comp (by roughly 15% on average, not including ESOP).
We’ll be releasing an updated Salary Guide in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, feel free to get in touch with us for specifics.
Make Sure EVERYONE is Onboard with Hiring:
Hiring (and more specifically struggling to hire) is a gigantic cost. Unfortunately, the size of these costs are often not quite understood across the wider business.
This can lead to certain individuals within your business putting their responsibilities within the hiring process to one side.
To them, it’s something that can be done later. To you, them delaying an interview for 3 days “because that’s when I eat lunch” (yes, this happened), might cost you one of the best candidates in the country, 9 additional weeks of your time, and an estimated $100K (yes this also happened).
The Strategies
Get Your Employer Brand Out There to Help with Inbound Interest:
Leverage platforms like LinkedIn to show off your EVP and the reasons why people should consider working for you!
Use your brain though - candidate’s bullshit detectors are quite good these days, don’t start waffling about quarterly barbeques and the like, nobody cares, if anything it’ll probably turn people off.
Showcase the real enjoyment, fulfilment and value of working for you, and build a positive impression within your market.
Posting Job Adverts:
Job adverts are so cheap that they’re always worth putting up. Remember though, candidates that apply to your job ad are likely applying to more than a handful of others, so be sensible with how you utilise your time, and be prepared to face tough competition.
I’d be lying if I said that job adverts always work though - in fact, they rarely do. Discipline to make the most of them (getting back to applicants on the same day), and a plan to step away from them when they’re not working (you’ll know within 2 weeks) are key to a good job ad strategy in my opinion.
Reposting the same ads for months on end is silly though - candidates notice, it makes you look desperate, and you only line Seek and LinkedIn’s pockets (us recruiters already pay them enough, you don’t need to as well, trust me).
Engage Passive Candidates:
Some may suggest a referral program - I wouldn’t.
It’s been proven time and time again that people will refer their friends because they are friends, and not based on their ability. That doesn’t mean that you can’t tap up the passive market!
Here’s what to do. Get your team together (mainly people currently doing the same or a similar job - developers for a dev role, for example), brief them on the role you’re hiring for, ask them to find 10-20 candidates on LinkedIn that they think look great. Collate this list, personalise outreach to all of them, and interview everyone that responds and is suitable.
It is fool proof? No. Is it infinitely better than relying on job ads? Without a shadow of a doubt.
Give a bonus to the staff member that put forward the candidate that you eventually hire - around $1000 would be sensible.
Engage Someone that Offers Talent Acquisition as a Service:
TA as a Service is exactly what it sounds like. At the fraction of the price of a full recruitment service, it allows you to buy your time back from doing tasks such as writing job ads, shortlisting and screening candidates, scheduling interviews as so on.
Scouut offers this, charging a weekly rate for as long as you want the help, or a flat fee until your role is filled.
On average, the cost of our TA as a Service offering is roughly 15% the final cost of our full service recruitment offerings, allowing you to get the best expertise in the industry on a super tight budget.
Engage a Recruiter on a Proactive Search:
Whilst I can’t say its undisputed fact (because some still somehow dispute it), the best businesses that hire the best people do so by utilising recruiters when necessary.
Do you need a recruiter for every role? Of course not! But refusing to use them when beneficial is shortsighted, and working with a good recruiter will always provide positive ROI.
Our clients haven’t spent millions of $ with us for a laugh, and as we’ve helped build many of the teams that went on to be named on those “Top 20/50/100 Start-Up” lists for the last 3 years, I doubt many regret it either.
The Application and Interview Process
Simplify Your Application Process:
One click. End of discussion. I won’t say any more.
Create an Action Plan for Applicants:
As I touched on earlier, if a candidate has applied to you, they have applied to someone else. It is your job to get in quickly to schedule an interview.
For us, a recruiter, we do this within an hour - but for you, 24 hours or less is a good goal (we’re somewhat realistic at least).
If you haven’t got the time to do this, you really shouldn’t be hiring. (Or, you need someone with a TA as a Service offering!)
The Screening Call:
The screening call is without doubt one of the most misunderstood steps of the application/interview process.
Your sole purpose is to determine candidate suitability at an extremely high level (salary in line, not a massive twat, etc.) whilst doing your absolute best to convince the candidate to prioritise your opportunity above all else throughout the interview process.
It is 90% for the candidate, and 10% for you. Put your best foot forward.
Your Overall Process:
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we should all know by now to keep your process at 3 stages or less, and try and limit or completely remove any form of take home challenge where possible.
If you are insistent on running a technical assessment, figure out how to squeeze it into an interview setting.
Outside of that, the biggest winners at the moment are those that are are to leave the most notable positive impact on a candidate - there are a lot of ways to do this, but interrogating candidates and acting like you are the dogs bollocks is not one of them.
Treat candidates as if they are a customer that you’d love to acquire, in this market, they will have more backup opportunities than you will have backup candidates.
The Speed of Your Process:
Last year, candidates successfully placed by Scouut spent an average of 8 days in interview processes with our clients, completing an average of 3 interview stages.
To do this, clients needed to provide same day feedback, or next day at the latest, and schedule the following interview to take place within 48 hours or so.
I’m going to be real here, but if you’re reading this thinking “ah it takes us 3, maybe 4 weeks to interview” - why? Get a grip. Scheduling interviews and providing feedback is basic admin. It takes no skill. If you’re telling me you can’t do it, you are telling me you can’t write emails and make phone calls.
At the risk of offending some people, stop being lazy, stop being unorganised, stop making hiring infinitely more challenging than it needs to be.
Decision Making & The Offer
The Pre-Final Interview Discussion:
When entering into the final interview with a candidate, discussion should have already taken place internally regarding the steps that will follow the interview.
You should already be planning to offer the role if the interview goes well, and strategy around how to make said offer needs to already be in place.
Whilst the performance of the candidate in the final interview may affect the figure you offer, discussions around the salary that you’re prepared to put forward to the candidate should have already been had internally, and assuming they pass the final interview, an offer (with paperwork) should be in front of them within 24 hours.
At this stage, you could potentially be in pole position - don’t screw it up.
The Pre-Close:
These days, candidates don’t decline offers. It’s far more likely for a candidate to sit on your offer, and let you know when they’ve accepted something else.
Pre-closing a candidate on a potential offer gives you far more information than you would otherwise have, allowing you to make a more informed decision.
Maybe you still offer them, maybe you offer them more, maybe you offer someone else instead, at least you have information to decide.
Not sure how to pre-close candidates? It’s something that’s covered in our Talent Strategy & Consulting sessions - feel free to get in touch to find out more ;).
If you Want Someone, Pay Them!:
The phrase “f-ck about find out” comes to mind. Your best offer needs to be put on the table first time. You may think you are saving $5K-$10K by offering below a candidates asking salary, but it’ll fail more often than not, and each failure costs significantly more than $10K.
If they’re legitimately not worth what they’re asking for, that’s a different story, but if you’re bargain hunting, building a high performing team that can complete in the start-up world is probably the wrong place to be.
Set A Deadline:
Some people prefer to get taken for a ride and get their pants pulled down, but in my experience, setting deadlines on an offer that you make is just a sensible business approach.
3-5 days in a reasonable timeframe, as candidates that are still waiting beyond this point are not legitimately interested, and are just keeping your offer open as an insurance policy.
Realistically, candidates will set their own deadlines for you to make them an offer anyway (often less than 3-5 days might I add), so you should not feel bad for doing the same, and protecting your own interests.
It’s Not Done Until it’s Done:
“We have a candidate at final stage so it’s basically filled” - No it’s not.
“We have an offer accepted so we’ve closed that one” - No you haven’t.
“The contract is going out later so it’s a done deal” - Whatever you say.
Until you have signed paperwork, and the candidate has handed in their notice and declined any counter offer, you have not filled your role.
Don’t cancel any interviews, keep your backups warm, and stay aware of what could go wrong.
Is it unlikely? Yes. Do we see start-ups make this mistake constantly? Also yes.
You don’t need to make the mistake yourself to learn from it.
And there you have it, 20 tips to help you stand above your competition this year. Whilst yes, some of this is fairly basic, despite the obvious nature, these are areas where many start-up still go wrong.
I have no doubt that nailing that above will put you above 80% of start-ups when it comes to hiring.
Want to be above 99%? Scouut clients are 😉
Matt Cook // Co-Founder @ Scouut // 0477 622 408 // Matt@scouut.com.au
Want something a little more proactive than a fortnightly blog?
Get in touch to find out why more than 100 start-ups continue to partner with us!
We offer:
Talent Acquisition as a Service (Saving you time for a fraction of the price)
Talent Strategy & Consulting (Putting you above the rest for years to come)
Contingent Recruitment (Sourcing the best around with no upfront cost)
Retained Recruitment (How Australia’s best hire via Scouut, with 100% success)
Let’s discuss options, and find out what’s best for you!